


iridescent

by TheVeryLastValkyrie



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: And I Guess It's Harder to Hide What You Feel in Your Head, And I Guess They Can Dream Together, And I Guess They Can Speak to Each Other Like Luke and Vader, F/M, So I Guess There's a Force Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-13
Updated: 2016-01-13
Packaged: 2018-05-13 19:33:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,200
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5714515
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheVeryLastValkyrie/pseuds/TheVeryLastValkyrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>For the Force-sensitive, touch isn't the only way of making a connection.</p>
            </blockquote>





	iridescent

_Rey._

It comes out of the darkness, but it can’t have. I turn on my side. I’m not awake enough to fall back to sleep, so I just go deeper.

_Rey._

Dreaming amplifies the sound, and the feelings follow: he’s in my head again, but I’m in his too. His thoughts reach out for mine, curling around them like wisps of black smoke, probing the armour I’m still learning to how to wear. There’s no way in. My mind is still mine, but the brushes along the inside of my skull are so…sensory, somehow. They feel tentative, like fingertips. I feel as if I’m being mapped from the inside, and I cringe away from the invasion. There’s a pulling as something tangles, as he tries to do something, but can’t, whatever it was twisted up in the web of my sleeping brain.

_Leave me alone._

_Do you have any idea how easy it was for me to find you? You need a real teacher._

_I have a real teacher._

_No, a_ real _teacher._

I’m taking the long breath I take before beginning the first saber drill, something which usually calms me. He’s plucked it out of my memory like a sand tick off skin; my dream breathing gets quicker, harsher. Master Luke stands a few paces away, always circling, always correcting, encouraging too. Artoo plays along sometimes, whizzing along in his footsteps. I have to stop mid-strike to laugh.

Kylo Ren would stand right behind me. He shows me so. He would make a hard fist under my shoulder and push my arm sharply upward, ignoring the slow control I’ve been practising. He attacks without considering defence, out of time with my body.

_Take your hand off me._

_But you felt it, didn’t you?_ It made him happy. It makes him smug. _The power._

_The power to kill isn’t power, it’s fear._

_That’s Skywalker talking._

_That’s your_ uncle _talking._

_I have no uncle._

_And no father either?_

The connection is steady enough for me to throw the image – Han Solo, the broad face with the bold nose and the laughter lines and the ageless eyes which saw everything, even his son. He bats it away, but it strikes anyway. The red haze I sense rather than see glows brighter at its heart, scarlet as he lights it up with a flare of anger.

 _No._ He offers me his face, opaque and empty. He offers me the mask. _No father either._ A tendril of darkness reaches out, its edges ragged, a slimy, awful thing searching for an anchor on my side of the link. It strikes something large, defined: pure white, blue-white hot like sunlight on the water. The dark draws back, burnt. Irritation spikes through us both like a minor heart attack. We go up, and then we go down, and things flicker. Something of him pushes past me, nudging my shoulder, trying to get behind me and unsettle me that way. There’s a roughness to it, and a kind of uncomfortably warm friction. This isn’t going how he planned.

_What did you think? That I’d just let you come in and take over?_

_I could do it. You know I could._

_So could I!_

The blue-white pulse takes a run at him, and the frayed confines of Kylo Ren are too fragile not to part for us, for me, for me and the pure white power which is mine if I want it. He breaks apart into Ben so easily, with a rushing and a howling that doesn’t start with him, that’s like wind. I see him. He was in colour once, and he had a pair of leggings worn almost through at the knee…from kneeling on a floor, picking up wrenches and spanners and torsion-drivers. Oil, he smells like. His mouth tastes like bright stimu-drinks, his lips are dry from running his tongue over them. He’s not strong enough, not yet. He can’t lift as much as he’d like to. He works on the Falcon to clean himself out, but knowledge – the same knowledge I have, of the same change happening to me – tingles through him.

His father is an orange punch of respect, and envy, and joy.

He knocks me back before I can go further, but I feel him quake. His lips draw back and his teeth want to snarl, but they’re my teeth too, and I can dig our fingernails into the furthest corners of his head and cling. He can eject me from his memories, but I control the connection. I can break it.

I _will_ break it.

 _So could I._ Tired, so tired. My light ripples, forming words I can’t read. Nothing is what it is in here.

But he wants his mask so much, the real one, his metal monster mask. He’s confusing his own face and Han’s, stumbling over shared features, bleeding out of the hole I made in the path he chose. He presses it, scratches at it, a baby’s wail erupting out and echoing and clanging like a body falling from up high onto a weathervane, somewhere, some _when_ long before us.

 _You miss her,_ I accuse him. _You miss her singing_.

There’s nothing tentative about him smothering my mouth, the horrified pressure of the thought of the square palm of his hand cutting me off, shutting me up. Pain is purple, and lying splits it into streaks and splashes of absence where there should be something, where some part of him needs me to share something with him, to understand.

_Stop it._

_I can help you,_ I find myself saying, through him, in spite of him. I’m tangled now too. I don’t know where he is and where I am. I can’t divide the dream and the link, and there’s no way to tell which side of the dividing line we’re standing on. Are we standing? He’s not. The vision whispering over me has my limp body in his arms, unconscious in the same chair as Poe Dameron in perfect, luminous detail. After that is more sketchy, but there’s still a trickle of light – not white, golden – and a saltiness where I’m sweating in the middle of a fight we haven’t had yet, and the intent in my eyes is gold, and my heart pounds like his in the place where my lips should be.

My heart pounds _like his_.

How can I understand when he doesn’t? All the colours and shapes blur together as he gathers them with the power I can’t deny he has, even the power in his long arms and straight-fingered hands and Han Solo’s jaw with Ben Solo’s vein popping off to one side. I bend, in his mind, and float and flow, and I’m not how I recognise myself, which is Rey, scavenger, trying, eating, breathing, my ears stinging with cold while the rest of me stays warm under Finn’s thoughtful extra blanket.

 _Still alone_ , he says.

_So are you._

_You have to keep warm._

And I’m reflected back onto me, swaddled in white instead of black, definite lines, boundaries. He puts them there for me.

_Why?_

I wake up. My hands don’t look like they belong to me anymore.


End file.
